This piece echoes a lot of the anti Demand Media opinions floating around the internet. We’ve heard enough on both sides of the argument. What’s more interesting is where this leads us.

Will we get to a place where these content farms create content that will perfectly satisfy what we are looking for when we type in those words in a Google search box?

As these new class of content companies war with each other AND existing individual online marketers, I suspect competition will not necessarily guarantee that the best content will rank highest.

So what ends up happening is that online search costs increase for the user. That doesn’t mean online users pay for doing searches. Rather, it’s an economic concept that refers to the time and money required to find information about something. In the end, it’s not Google that loses the most, it’s the consumer.

The bottom line is that you need to think long and hard about how you want to take content to market. Creating great content is only the first step; if you want those eyeballs and audience, be prepared to invest in distribution and marketing.

I’m kicking off a new category on this blog, content is king. I figure it might be useful in the future.

Before hanging up, Redstone repeated a line he gave when introducing the Viacom earnings call last week, saying that “Content is always king.” In his opening remarks, Moonves couldn’t resist celebrating the record-breaking Super Bowl viewership of 106.5 million. “In a socially fragmented universe, big events and TV viewership provides the biggest bang for the buck.”

Some great quotes in this piece. First, here’s Barry Diller on Eisner’s character:

“If you are a corporatist for 38 years, and one at a senior level for
30-something of those years and in a position of C.E.O. of Disney,
which is a totalitarian regime, and it stops cold, it’s going to have
an extraordinary effect. Most people don’t survive the contrast. It’s
annihilating.”

Second, is Eisner’s conviction that content drives value:

“It’s always the content that defines the platform,” he says. Now the
platform owners are “being arrogant and saying, ‘we’re it,’” he adds.
“But eventually exclusive content wins out.”

The talk about the Google vs. Viacom continues. Although big media clips don’t dominate youtube views, content is still king. Big media may not be so kingly these days because content is being uploaded to the net by millions of internet users, but content still rules. However, because of the explosion of content, things like search and building social communities around content become more important. In that sense, distribution takes on a completely different meaning in this new game. The technology and infrastructure is all the same, regardless of which online video sharing site you use. What differentiates video sharing sites are the tools and communities that help users search, find, and share content.

In any case, the one thing that everyone can agree on is that we don’t have a rock solid monetization model for all this yet.

Content
is king and will remain king. As I point out to my friends, people watch what’s
on CBS—they don’t care what channel it is on. We don’t denigrate distribution.
We have a tremendous number of top radio stations; we have a large number of
important television stations. It’s not that we don’t believe in
distribution—it’s that we do believe in content.

Following up on my previous post regarding the importance of content, here is a piece title “Content is King” written by Bill Gates in 1996. To summarize, he says that micropayments will make everything work a lot better on the internet:

…within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content
providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information.
If you decide to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won’t be
writing a check or getting a bill in the mail for a nickel. You’ll
just click on what you want, knowing you’ll be charged a nickel
on an aggregated basis.

Ten years later and we’re not there yet… but we do have google adsense. Click on that, the content provider makes a nickel and voila, content providers are paid for their work!